SAYHU’s Origin Story

SAYHU was co-founded in by seven women of color in Houston who recognized a need for a radical space for young South Asians in which they could build alliances as they engaged in social justice-oriented work. While summer institutes had been created by South Asians elsewhere in the US (in California, Washington DC, New York, to name a few) there was a big gap in the South. We saw a need in Houston for something similar to the types of transformational programs for South Asian youth that existed in these other cities. We also realized that their curricula and approach were different from what we needed here in Texas. After a series of conversations over a couple of years, South Asian Youth in Houston Unite was initiated in April 2017 by Eesha Pandit, Rachel Afi Quinn, Gayatri Joshi, Saneea Sakhyani, Samira Ali, Rachna Khare, and Praveena Lakshmanan. 

As an assistant professor teaching about transnational feminist theory, Rachel was particularly interested in structuring the project as a feminist collective and wanted to learn from Eesha’s engagement with Southern black feminism as a member of the Crunk Feminist Collective. Praveena was already doing research on experiences of migration among South Asian women in Houston and Samira was conducting research and teaching students about sexual health as a social work professor. Saneea’s interests as a student of public history led us to focus on preserving the stories of South Asian Houstonians through feminist oral history practices that account for some of the trauma of immigrant experience and gather South Asian stories in our own digital archive. Gayatri’s understanding of the complexities of first generation identity and family dynamics, and her career trajectory as a social worker has informed our approach profoundly. In working with Rachna, our vision and our curriculum was also shaped by the aims of Daya and the healthy relationship trainings for youth that they began developing at the time.

THe SAYhu collective is dynamic

Rachna stepped away as a collective member after the first year to focus on running Daya but has remained an integral part of our community network and has collaborated with us on the Summer Institute every year since. Praveena, Samira, and Saneea have also moved on from the SAYHU collective but we are thankful for their contributions to our curriculum, efforts in community-building, and the direction of our work. Gayatri moved out of her role as collective member in summer 2020.

In July 2020 SAYHU’s collective leadership consisted of three people: Eesha, Noorulanne, and Rachel. Noorulanne joined the collective in May of 2018, while she was a first year law student. After coordinating the SAYHU Summer Institute with us in 2018, she is now focused on hosting film screenings for the Houston community. Particularly films that aim to spark conversation about how South Asians interact with their material and ecological environments, both locally and globally. Noorulanne moved on from her role as collective member in fall 2020 to focus on her career in law. Thankfully community members step in and support or design SAYHU programming as people do come and go as they are able. We’re always looking for more folks to get more involved and join in this work at different levels of engagement. We have had SAYHU community members step in to lead a mental health support group and others represent us on local and national coalitions and others contribute to our online presence and support our social media network.

SAYHU remains a beloved community

In Spring 2022, after two years of pandemic time, which included a successful 2021 virtual summer institute and social media internships, Eesha and Rachel have stepped away from their leadership roles to focus on other research, writing, and social justice work in the world. After more than five years of programming events, and extensive learning and growing, it’s time for other community members to step in to make the space they were looking for in SAYHU and work to carry the feminist community’s feminist vision forward.

Check out the blog post that Eesha and Rachel published in June 2022 about all we’ve accomplished as a community and what’s possible looking forward.

how we HAve fund SAYHU

We began SAYHU with a seed grant from the Resonance Network’s Innovation Fund and later through generous support from the Simmons Foundation. Renewed funding from Simmons has allowed us to facilitate an annual summer institute and a summit in 2018. Over the past several years, we have worked collaboratively to run programming that is of interest to the growing SAYHU community network. For example, after the first Summer Institute we realized that there was a much broader community of social justice-minded South Asians of all ages in Houston who wanted to connect through and with us. This led us to organize our first Southern Regional Summit, and to host many more community gatherings throughout the year. Out efforts have continued to evolve and during the global pandemic beginning in 2020 we brought the Summer Institute and community gatherings online while expanding our network across Texas.

We’ve been intentional about developing our programming as a feminist collective, and not a traditional non-profit organization. This means that we have not had staff, but community members volunteer their time to organize the events they want to be a part of. As responsibilities increased, collective members received small stipends for our work, with the bulk of our resources going toward our summer institute and various community events. Later on we were able to offer paid internships for youth and hire community members in different roles to support our online presence and our ongoing programming. SAYHU is not a non-profit, so we worked with The Social Good Fund to administer our resources. We regularly also collaborate with partner organizations in Houston and nationally to make community events possible.

SAYHU In the Future

As a feminist collective, our aim has always been for SAYHU to be a self-sustaining community network in which all members feel inspired and emboldened to contribute, collaborate and steer the direction of our South Asian-centered transnational feminist community programming in Houston. We practice peer mentorship to facilitate opportunities for community members to expand their knowledge of women of color feminist theory and community leadership skills.

SAYHU can and will grow over time and be shaped by the interests of those involved throughout Houston and the region, who step in to con connect with peers and mentors, organize programming, and skillshare, in order to build our South Asian social justice networks in Texas.

We’re grateful to the many members of our community who have influenced our thinking thus far, and supported us by doing outreach, partnering with us at whatever capacity, and who sought to work in feminist collaboration with SAYHU by giving generously of their time and energy in order to build our beloved community. Please make use of our curriculum and resources build on what we started!

To be continued…